Within minutes of arriving in Brunswick, Georgia, we found a room at Brunswick Manor, a gorgeous Victorian house that overlooks an empty square, and a table outside a bar on the main street, from which we watched the rain come down. A man holding a glass of beer told us that the next block was being redone to resemble Ybor City so that Ben Affleck could shoot his new movie there. (On the drive in we had passed the facade of what looked to be a hollowed out Cuban restaurant.) A younger man appeared, in a plaid shirt and brown beard, and chatted with the beer man while holding a tow-headed child. He was in good spirits, he said, because he'd just finished writing a new song. Later, talking to us, he mentioned that his main work was as a pastor. When the rain stopped we finished our drinks and headed up the block to The Southern Table, the restaurant of our B&B owner, where the wait staff all wore hats. It seemed an odd touch, but perhaps they're hoping for parts as extras. My shrimp and grits were delicious.
We spent a day and a half traversing the city before we ran across a bookstore. Before the trip a Toronto friend, whom I had asked about bookstores, had warned me that the situation for bibliophiles had deteriorated in recent years, and, indeed, we found the same domination of restaurants and food stores that always depresses me in New York (with the exception of when I'm hungry). The store we stumbled upon, on a rainy Friday, was Balfour Books, a lovely refuge from the drizzle except for the rumble of empty garbage cans that the proprietor rolled very ploddingly from the front door to the back. The shelves held very little junk, and a wonderful mix of Canadian, English and American authors. I bought a collection of travel essays by Norman Lewis, The Happy Ant Heap, published by Jonathan Cape in London, and reflected that the same influences - English and American - that make Canadian bookstores interesting also make their comedians funny.
Balfour Books was on College Street which, of course, should have been lined with bookstores. Queen Street West, with its vintage shops and ethnic restaurants (food again), could have benefited from a musty secondhand bookshop. (It did have an excellent store selling musical instruments.)
Giving up on books, we went for art, and found, in the Art Gallery of Ontario, more paintings of snow than I had ever seen. They turned interesting when we entered a room of William Kurelek's whimsical works.
But the real show was in the streets. (Kurelek probably would have agreed, even though the weekend temperatures were in the high 80s.) The city's already international flavor was heightened because of the Pan Am games, and we occasionally passed packs of athletes parading their national colors. At various places stages had been set up: the Distillery District, Nathan Phillips Square in front of City Hall, and Dundas Square, which was hosting a Francophone music festival. We walked and admired the rich variety of faces (some of them veiled, others topped by Blue Jays caps) and, eventually, forgot about books. Then, on the way back to our friend's apartment, we'd pass the perennial line waiting outside Uncle Tetsu's for Japanese cheesecake.
Caipirinhas were flowing at the Coral Gables Museum last night as my friend Ben Batchelder presented his new book, To Belem and Back. A few years ago Ben drove with his black Lab from Tiradentes, where he lives part of the year, to Belem, the port city in the north, and then returned home along the coast, covering over 10,000 miles in a journey that, as he said last night, was the equivalent of driving back and forth across the United States twice.
Ben self-published the book, deciding early on that he didn't want to go the traditional route (taking the same approach to publishing that he had to travel). Qualitywise, the book would have been well received by publishers; it's unclear however, with the industry's current parochialism, whether anyone would have eagerly taken on a book about a Brazilian road trip. It's the kind of book that would have easily found a home in the 80s, but today Americans are more interested in memoirs. The citizens of the country with the most influence in the world have unfortunately, if not disastrously, turned their backs to the world.
But a good crowd came out last night to hear Ben read and talk about Brazil. (The event was sponsored by the Council of the Americas.) Afterwards, waiting in line for a book, I asked two women if they were Brazilian. "No," Anat said, "we're fans of Brazil." We formed an immediate Brazilian Admiration Society.
Later, I talked to a woman from Wales, now living in Hollywood, who had never been to Brazil and wondered what was so special about the country. I told her of my visit a few years ago to Ouro Preto. My friend arrived by bus from Sao Paulo and I walked her to her pension, where the owner answered the door, a woman who looked to be about 15 years older than Lilian. Within minutes the two women were chatting, laughing, warmly touching each other.
"So you know her?" I asked Lilian when the woman had gone for the key. "You've stayed here before?"
"No," Lilian said. "We've never met."
The two women - innkeeper and guest - had instantly gotten beyond the business relationship and interacted with each other as one human being to another. More than that - like friend with friend. And because I'd seen this only in Brazil, it struck me as uniquely Brazilian.
Back from five days in Virginia, where we visited Staunton, the town where Woodrow Wilson was born; Monticello, where I was struck by the modest scale; the campus of the University of Virginia, where we saw the dorm room of Edgar Allan Poe; and Veritas Vineyard, where my niece was married on a gorgeous afternoon.
While in Charlottesvile, we strolled the mall, which reminded me of Lincoln Road in Miami Beach except that the sunglass shops were replaced by used bookstores and the models by people with degrees.
"San Miguel de Allende," the travel writer said, "is like Santa Fe. You want to hate it but you can't."
Listening to A Prairie Home Companion Saturday night, live from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, I was reminded of the travel story I ran on the clinic back in the early 90s, with black-and-white photographs by the author, Mark Chester. As a Travel section cover story it was as unusual then as it would be impossible today.